1979 · Behind the Songs
Joe Walsh brought a movie cut to the band’s last album of the seventies — and never stopped playing it.
“In the City” reached the Eagles sideways. Joe Walsh wrote it with Barry De Vorzon and recorded it first himself, releasing it in April 1979 on the soundtrack of the film The Warriors — cut at MRI Recording in Hollywood, produced by De Vorzon and Walsh for A&M, running 3:54.
The rest of the Eagles liked the track enough to claim it. They re-recorded it with Walsh on lead vocals and guitar for The Long Run — released September 24, 1979 on Asylum and produced by Bill Szymczyk — where it runs a leaner 3:46.
It was never released as a single, yet “In the City” became a fixture of American album-rock radio and of Walsh’s own concerts, where it has rarely left the setlist. The band revisited it on the 1994 live album Hell Freezes Over, stretching the ending into a slowed-down nod to the guitar hook of the Beatles’ “Day Tripper.”
A staged studio clip of the Eagles version shows the band’s division of labor: Walsh on a double-neck Gibson — the twelve-string neck for rhythm, the six-string for slide — Timothy B. Schmit on Fender bass, Don Felder on a Fender Stratocaster, Don Henley behind an eight-piece Ludwig kit with Paiste cymbals, Glenn Frey on piano, and Joe Vitale on congas. It is a small portrait of a band at the end of an era, playing a song about surviving the city — together, one more time.